Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly indicated that this change occurred because the college had updated its Mass Email Communication Policy; it has not. Instead, the Student Association made an internal change to grant the Class Council greater control over the moderation of emails sent through the Class of lists. We also clarified language to describe CIT’s role with regards to the Class of lists—they do not control these lists, they only maintain the lists’ membership. We apologize for the mistakes.
The beginning of this semester raised key issues regarding how clubs and organizations communicate with members of the college. Due to intersession classes, the email server “WhatsUp” was briefly affected, in which only intersession students had access to information from the server.
While the issue has been fixed, clubs and organizations are still having trouble relaying information about their events to students.
Previously, clubs and organizations were able to use the listservs dedicated to each class year to send information out to students as individual email messages; however, this is no longer allowed. The problem arose when students complained to administration that they were receiving too many emails from clubs and organizations that they were not interested in.
“Daily we would receive about … 10 emails a day from clubs and organizations about the events that are happening,” Student Association President senior Corey Wilkinson said. “So, as you can imagine, that’s 10 emails that a student is receiving every single day about events that are happening on campus, and the complaint that we were getting was that they weren’t applying to those students.”
CIT Director and College Information Officer Sue Chichester—who maintains the membership of the Class of lists— spoke about the intended role of the Class of lists.
“The ‘Class Of’ lists were never meant for events,” Chichester said in a statement. “The purpose of these lists is to communicate information that is particular to the members of each list.”
Now, clubs and organizations are complaining that they are unable to reach students.
“Now the challenge I think to ‘WhatsUp’ is one, it’s digested,” Dean of Students and Director of the Center for Community Leonard Sancilio said. “Meaning that if 10 people send messages out to ‘WhatsUp’ they all don’t go out as individual messages, all 10 will go out at once and there’ll be a digest of these other messages. If you’re interested, go find the information about it.”
SA Director of Student Programming Julia Sisti explained that the culture around ignoring “WhatsUp” has negatively impacted clubs and organizations.
“I relied heavily on publicizing through the ‘Class Of’ listservs, so I have seen an affect in attendance in my events since the “Class Of” servers have decreased,” Sisti said. “There is a culture of not checking ‘WhatsUp,’ and that regardless of what the college wants to try and make people check ‘WhatsUp’ … it’s not happening.”
Sisti offers some solutions to clubs and organizations so that they can spread their information to students.
“You can reserve up to three different spots in the union for publicity each week,” Sisti said. “You can reserve a painted window, you can reserve one of those poster boards … chalkboards, tabling, the painted wall outside by the Sturges area.”
Clubs and organizations are also able to utilize the on-campus duplicating center to make posters and flyers for their events. Social media is another alternative to spread information about certain events to students.
As the issue of the email server continues, Wilkinson assures that he is working with administrators to devise a solution that will improve the ability of clubs and organizations to advertise their events. Currently the Class Council moderates each of the Class of lists.
“I do think just ignoring ‘WhatsUp’ is not the best idea because it is there and it’s in place to do exactly what students are complaining about. But obviously if they’re complaining about it, it’s not effective, it’s not doing what it’s supposed to,” Wilkinson said. “So, what I’ve been trying to do is figure out exactly why ‘WhatsUp’ isn’t effective and what we can do to fix ‘WhatsUp.’”
News editor Kara Burke contributed reporting to this article.